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This machine came to be called the RIP-5 and eventually was shared with the Army's SIS.Īn OP-20-G history described the RIP-5 as "the kana character represented by a dot-dash combination which, in International Morse, represented a Roman letter, was printed by the type block actuated by the key, which on a normal typewriter, caused that letter to print." That is, when a Japanese clerk transmitted "-…," the U.S. In order to provide standard representation of Japanese in intercept, OP-20-G's Laurance Safford bought and modified typewriters for intercept operators. Katakana was usually used for sending telegrams and for Morse transmissions from ships or military units - and was what American intercept operators meant when they said they "copied kana" or "copied kana code."
#Navy linguist code#
In written messages, code book values might be in any of the three writing systems, kanji, hiragana, or katakana. These latter writing systems are similar to each other, each composed of two-letter syllables. Chinese characters, known as kanji, were taken into Japanese as "loan words" at several points in history and supplement the two indigenous writing systems, known as hiragana and katakana. Verbs assume diverse forms, many in the passive voice to avoid bluntness. There are different levels of politeness, used according to the relative social positions of speaker and listener. Word order in Japanese is more akin to Latin than English, with verbs placed at the end of sentences and suffixes on each word indicating its place in the sentence structure. A European missionary of the 16th century, one of the first but certainly not the last foreigner to be frustrated by the subtleties of Japanese, called it the "Devil's language." Many Europeans and Americans since have come to agree with him. As both the Navy's OP-20-G and the Army's Signals Intelligence Service began to solve Japanese cryptosystems in the 1930s, they faced a second challenge, the underlying language itself.įor a variety of linguistic and cultural reasons, the Japanese language has been difficult for westerners to master.